The present invention relates to asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) communication systems. More especially the present invention relates to an apparatus that facilitate ATM switch operation during, periods of peak data traffic, and to the problem of efficiently allocating bandwidth resources in a situation where a multiplexed stream of ATM cells are to be individually switched to different ports.
This problem has been addressed and discussed in Great Britain patent application GB9212447.8.
ATM data traffic is predominantly burst type data traffic. By its nature, burst traffic requires high bandwidths for a part of the time and little or no bandwidth for the rest of the time. In order to efficiently use available bandwidth it is necessary to allocate the bandwidth using the mean bandwidth requirement of each data source and not the peak bandwidth. It will be appreciated that if mean bandwidth allocation is used, the total peak bandwidth may thus be greater than the bandwidth available. Thus in operation of an ATM switch, a problem occurs when a number of data sources burst at the same time causing a peak overload condition to occur inside an ATM switch/multiplexer. If not controlled or limited, this condition will cause data overflow in one or more of the switch/multiplexer internal data buffers, and will result in lost data.
Data destined for a particular output port will enter a switch from many different input ports. The total instantaneous data rate across a switch may be greater than an output port can sustain, and therefore buffering is required. However, even with the provision of buffering, eventual loss of data due to buffer overflow may occur. To reduce this probability to an operationally acceptable level by simply increasing peak capability, results in a low utilization of the switch for much of the time, which is clearly unacceptable. A dynamic bandwidth allocation protocol, as described hereafter, provides a method of allocating bandwidth by sending requests for bandwidth to a designated output port and sending data thereafter only when bandwidth has been allocated as indicated by a return acknowledgement message.
In ATM systems request messages for increases in bandwidth are sent by an input port server to an output port bandwidth allocation mechanism for initial processing. When a switch is heavily loaded, bandwidth is only available from an output port when a bandwidth cleardown message arrives which serves to release some bandwidth. Therefore, bandwidth request messages will always be rejected until after a cleardown. Under these circumstances the first request to be received after a cleardown will be allocated the recently cleared down bandwidth. This is clearly unfair to request messages which may have been rejected just before the bandwidth cleardown message arrived. Requests rejected by an output port are re-sent after a suitable backoff delay. This may lead to unacceptable delays and perhaps to periods during, backoff delays when there is bandwidth.